by Lavie Tidhar
“It is not uncommon,” Bar-Hillel says, as though confirming your thoughts. Turns a page, looks up; gives you the ghost of a smile, meant to be reassuring.
“Yet we persevered,” Professor Hashimi says.
“Why?” La Méduse says again, sharply. You get the feeling she does not entirely approve of you.
“I disappeared,” you tell her. Your voice is soft and calm. It leaves no trace of itself. “On my way to the souq, to Al-Hamidiyah, the world suddenly tilted and changed. The street lay ruined, corpses littered the street. The sky turned red and there was heavy smoke, it was hard to see. I heard sirens in the distance, the sound of swift planes flying low overhead. A young boy ran to me. One of his arms was missing. He looked at me wordlessly, with a sort of wonder. ‘My sister, my sister,’ he kept saying. ‘Uchti, uchti.’ It only lasted a moment. Then he faded away and was gone.”
“Six independent witnesses confirmed it,” Professor Hashimi says. His voice has the tiniest tone of professional satisfaction. “She was gone for just over ten seconds. She was a natural. I said it, straightaway, when they wanted to remove her name from the candidacy lists. I said it, didn’t I? She was a natural.”
“You did,” Bar-Hillel says, patiently. “That is on the record.”
“I had your card,” you say, with startled recall. You had all but forgotten it. Your first time. That careless slip, like a woman stepping on ice in the street. The moment of lost balance, the shock as you fall. This isn’t supposed to happen. You remember it, the smell of that world: the smell you came to associate with war. A scent so foreign to you then. You looked around yourself in mute bewilderment. What was this place? The airplane flying overhead; for just a moment you caught sight of a flag on the engine: red, blue and white, a five-sided star in a circle, adorned with stripes. Why were they attacking? What had happened to turn Damascus into this battleground, this vision of the apocalypse? Then the boy, out of nowhere, that stump of an arm waving, pale face and dark hair stained with red dust, and those awful eyes that saw you and yet, perhaps, didn’t: which seemed to impose upon your person someone else, some resident of this netherworld which you—hallucinated?
What happened? Did you fall in the street? Did you crack your head? For this can’t be real, this vision of Damascus, this boy—who stares at you, with these strange, startling green eyes, eyes like yours, and his lips move, my sister, my sister, and you, you tried to ward him off, your hand raised, no, no, and he stared at you, and behind him the dust rose, outlining the ghostly shapes of masked men rising out of the ruined buildings with guns in their hands, and the boy—
Faded, silently, and the world rushed back in, the sound of birds and an old Diana Haddad song on a radio somewhere, nearby, and the hum of the cars on the road.
Did you think you were going mad?
“Excuse me?”
“Did you think you were going mad?” Bar-Hillel says, patiently.
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
You stare at him coolly. Professor Hashimi chuckles. Even La Méduse forms a smile, though it is like a crack appearing in a cement wall, an alarming sight. Bar-Hillel frowns. Turns a page with a dry rustle.
Your life, bound into a single dossier.
“I had the director’s—”
“Of course, he wasn’t director then—”
“Yes, yes,” Hashimi says, impatient. Puffs on his electronic device. Turns a disapproving eye on his deputy. “We’ve been through this, Bar-Hillel.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Professor Hashimi’s card,” you say. “No, I did not think I was mad. I believed in what happened. It was real. Somehow, I had stumbled into another world. A parallel one to ours. An alternate one. It was the same city, but different.”
“So you came here.”
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
“This time,” you say, with a faint smile, “I listened.”
You’re smiling, but you are beginning to grow impatient. What do they want? You wish they would get to the point.
“And then?” Bar-Hillel says.
“You know all this! It’s all in there, in your, your dossier,” you say.
“Indulge me,” he says.
“What is this, a trip down memory lane?”
But of course you remember. You remember even as you try to forget.
13.
The training, first, though. The Border Agency has its facilities near Sidon, in the Lebanon. Here you were given no further answers, only tools. Arms, a thing for which your people had little use otherwise: how to fire a pistol, how to shoot a long-range rifle, how to assemble and disassemble a gun. You spent hours on the shooting range, you and these other, anonymous agents, as plain and unremarkable as you were. You discovered you were a fair shot with a gun, that you did not mind its weight in your hands, that you enjoyed the sense of recoil, the ping of a discarded cartridge, the smell of gunpowder. You knew, logically, that you might be required to use it, that there was a reason for this exercise. You contemplated the idea of wounding or killing another person. It should have been repugnant to you, you thought. Violence—arms—these were forbidden after the Small Holocaust, and you were taught to regard them in horror, with a special loathing like that reserved for carrion. And yet, when you pictured it, when you imagined aiming the gun, you felt nothing, or so, at least, you told yourself.
During this time, too, you underwent constant psychological evaluation. Others dropped out, disappeared day by day: each morning there were fewer of you in the dormitories. The mornings were cool and bright and the nights long and warm: you learned judo, karate, krav maga, Persian wrestling, Egyptian stick fighting. You learned to use a knife, construct a bomb, pick locks, use codes. You learned languages, but some of them were unknown and some strange, mutated: forms of Hebrew or Arabic strained through foreign filters, with unknown words, bizarre forms of speech.
You learned to read maps, even as they told you, repeatedly, that maps could not be trusted. You picked the locks off doors, only to be told that some doors mustn’t be opened. You learned to fight, only to be told that fighting is ultimately futile.
“What is it all for?” you asked one of the instructors, a woman veiled in fine black silk.
“We’re just trying to keep you alive,” she told you. “Now, concentrate, please. Flowing punch, scissor punch, eagle hand, and kick, and again . . .”
That year you wintered in the Lebanon, as the leaves fell from the trees and the days grew short. The sunlight was white on the hills. In this light you began to see doubles; over the peaceful town of Sidon war planes appeared; in the old city, when you walked, a car bomb shook the ancient flagstones, screams cut the day to ribbons. When you blinked, all traces of such violence were gone, erased; in the sunlight the same schoolkids ran laughing who mere moments ago lay bloodied and still on the stones. A young man passed you, smiling, who moments before wore a vest of explosives. In the sky seagulls flew, crying, streaks of white against blue.
“History is not one thing,” an instructor told you. It was spring, and the air was filled with the humming of bees. You had become better at holding the visions at bay, controlling them, so that at times it seemed to you that you could simply slip, from one reality to the next, almost without trying. “It is a tapestry, like an old Persian rug, multiple strands of stories, criss-crossing. Some are strong, central. Some fray at the ends, or fall off altogether. The places where they meet we call a crosshatch; they are peopled by shadows and doubles. They are places not to be trusted. Stories get muddled easily there.”
“I don’t understand,” you said, and the instructor said, “You will have to go there.”
At that a horror of a sort caught at your heart; but also excitement. There were only two of you left, by then.
The journey came in the summer. You took the slow train from Beirut to Jaffa, going inland past snow-capped Jabal Haramun, through forests of pine and oa
k, down to the hot shimmering haze of the Mediterranean coast. Here again Hebrew became prevalent in the air, and in Jaffa Harbour you sat at an outdoor fish restaurant run by a man from Syria, where tourists gathered in a cloud of foreign perfumes, a multiplicity of tongues. There was only you by then.
“I told them, didn’t I?” Professor Hashimi says. “Yes, yes already,” Bar-Hillel says, sourly, and turns a page.
The next morning you travelled up, the land changing into hills, then mountains. You reached Bab al-Wad, the Gate of the Valley, a road that sharply ascends up to the Jerusalem mountains. Here there was a manned post, and a gate, barring your way.
You disembarked. The soldiers were young and seemed bored. Traffic seldom came this way, and when it did, it was politely but firmly turned away. You waited, in the shade of a pine tree whose needles lay soft as brush hairs on the ground.
“But it went wrong, didn’t it?” La Méduse says. Her voice raises goosebumps on your arms. Her voice is as soft as pine needles. It demands your memory, everything you wanted gone, erased.
And you think: We all have the people we have lost in the passing.
“Yes,” you say. “Yes, it went wrong.”
But you do not think of what came later: the soldiers, Anwar’s body shuddering as the bullets bit into his flesh, ravenously, like hungry dogs; you do not think of dark blood running down old white stone streets. You do not think of his shadow, cast against the wall in the setting sun, his shadow, falling.
You think of the smell of pine resin, and of a sky white with clouds, dotted blue, a sky like a comfortable blanket. Then he was there, as though he had always been there, moving so smoothly from one state of being to another that it took your breath away.
“I’m Anwar,” he said. “You must be Nur.”
His hair was cut short, his eyes a dark green. He was like a young olive tree, you thought then, a sapling. He took your hand and held it. His hand was warm, like bark. He said, “Are you ready?” and you nodded, with more confidence than you felt.
You slipped away like shadows. The soldiers were no longer there, their outpost gone as though it had never existed. Already you were slipping sidewise, shifting through fragment-worlds, splinter-shadows, adjacencies. The sensation of it was like passing through a cold fine mist. You walked on foot up the steep mountain road. Around you cars suddenly swarmed, a foreign make, the drivers honking furiously: then they were gone and in their place there was nothing, a single silence lying over hills on which no human foot had ever stepped, the sun shining brightly over coral peonies, Spanish brooms and Mesopotamian irises, until the sun fell suddenly and night came, and two moons hung, briefly, in the sky, then disappeared as the road expanded into an eight-lane highway where cars shark-finned and sleek roared in every direction at such speeds that sonic booms rocked the daytime—
On and on Anwar went and you followed, through would have beens and could have beens, until the rotting skeletons of old armoured cars began to appear on the sides of the road and the air filled with smoke and car exhaust, with drivers leaning out of their windows cursing, and a ruined fort came up on the hill, and you saw a van stop, and Jewish averchim clad in black poured out, placed giant speakers in the middle of the road and began to dance, to the echoing beat of machine music, dancing and clapping and running between the stalled cars, their zealous joy infectious—
Until they, too, were gone abruptly. A small red sun rose momentarily in the east and fell, too quickly, and for a moment you saw Ursalim as a city of white, delicate, towering stone, a city of the future with its minarets and skyscrapers reaching for the sky, and airships floated majestically between the buildings, like fat flies—but what flag they carried you did not know: you had never seen its like before and never did again.
Then all was gone, and you had crested the hill and looked down, on Ursalim: a terrible plain of black obsidian stone, smooth as a mirror, in which nothing lived and nothing moved, a black sea which had swallowed what had once been home to countless generations of humanity.
Jerusalem, the city to which all other cities are but imperfect acts of mimicry: a city in which stories are told. They are stories of bloodshed and stories of wars, of love, of faith—
Erased, in this world, with one awful act, turned into stone, a history suspended.
“Who did this?” you whispered. You held on to his hand.
Anwar turned, shrugged.
“We did. They did. Does it matter?”
“No,” you said. Or perhaps you only thought you spoke. The sight of that barren plain silenced you. Slowly you made your way down into the city, and as you did the shifting began once more: in earnest this time.
“You were only meant to shift locally,” La Méduse says, taking, you think, an unholy interest in all of this. “So what happened?”
Bar-Hillel coughs and turns a page. No one speaks. Hashimi stares out of the window.
It wasn’t Anwar, you want to explain. It was you. It was your fault.
At first he led, through the borders between the sephirot: a cold tingling sensation, dry ice, resistance. Then you took the lead. All your training had come to this. You led, and Anwar followed, holding your hand like a child. You pushed through the membrane between worlds, wanting nothing more than to escape the black stone: it melted away and a rough village formed, and camels dozed in the shade of a palm tree; then came white stone walls, towers, the call of a muezzin from a mosque. A green sky and a fallow moon.
“Slow down,” Anwar said, “slow down,” but you kept pushing, exploring now, giddy with the power of it, this ability to move between worlds.
You willed it and it happened: things moved differently, time branched, and you passed rapidly onto a Jerusalem in which Homo sapiens palestinus built shelters in the mountain caves, a group of them rising suddenly out of snow and sleet and fog, so that you gasped and Anwar reached for a weapon, but they were not interested in you but in the Neanderthals behind you, small and squat, wrapped in furs, holding stone knives as the two humanoid species converged; this was history, you thought, this was real, not a fantasy: there had once been different species of men, but they all died; though in some other worlds they lived still.
You pushed through, and through, and through, until, for a moment, you glimpsed, from just the corner of your eye, the Ein Sof: the world beyond worlds, where the last door stands. But Anwar screamed, “Stop!” and you fell sidewise, jolted, and onto a city street; and time stopped, and started again—
“Oh, that place,” La Méduse says. “The place where they never stopped fighting?”
“Which one,” Professor Hashimi says, and unexpectedly laughs, a sound without humour, an academic scoring a point. And you think—they know which world it was, there is a purpose here—
Jerusalem, on a mid-afternoon outside the Dung Gate. Cars drove past, and people stared at you, suspiciously. Anwar looked left and right: his troubled face told you more than words.
“What is it?” you said, but then you saw the soldiers.
They wore olive-coloured uniforms and carried assault rifles, comfortably, as they searched the people coming in through the gate, going into the Old City.
Not all, you saw. But those who looked like you, perhaps. You saw an old man stopped, carrying two bags of shopping. An argument ended with the man pushed on his stomach to the ground, his face pressed into the dirt. His bags fell from his hands and you saw an orange roll, roll until it came to a rest at your feet. The man was handcuffed, hauled away: a bruise was forming on his torn cheek and he was crying.
Anwar tugged your hand. “We need to go, now,” he said, but it was too late. The soldiers saw you. You saw the bored contempt in their eyes, you wondered what they made of you. They were young, as young as you.
“Shift,” Anwar said. “Hurry.”
“Stop!” one of the soldiers called. “Raise your hands!”
You couldn’t move. You stared down at the orange, fascinated. You wanted to pick it up. You were
enchanted by everything around you, this real, living Jerusalem in the place where that terrible black rock had been. And the soldier spoke Hebrew.
“You messed up,” La Méduse says.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Professor Hashimi objects, but mildly, without conviction. “She was a novice, Anwar was an experienced agent. He should have handled the situation.”
“We keep making the mistake of thinking the sephirot are real,” La Méduse says, a hint of contempt. “We let them trap us.”
How could you have explained it then?
Already your memories were changing.
You were Nur, of Hebron, yes: a second-year student at Al-Quds University, studying literature and history; travelling from Hebron, you were used to police stops, army check posts, to the indignity of travel. You were used to feeling afraid for who you were, to avoiding crowds, to hiding your face. Your brother died in the Intifada; your father was home with a stroke, your mother taking care of him.
What was that other world, the fantasy world you sometimes dreamed of? Ursalim, where another Nur could travel freely by train from Haifa to Damascus, where she was free.
It was just a fantasy, a way of escaping a world where you were, eternally, a refugee.
You saw Anwar was affected, too. He knew this world. Later, you read his file.
You found out he had spent time there, had an identity, a past.
He tried to shift you. You resisted.
The soldiers came, boredom replaced with hostile suspicion. Anwar pushed you away as he pulled out his gun.
“He panicked,” Professor Hashimi says. “It happens.”
“He was wanted, wasn’t he?” La Méduse says. “He was wanted, in that other place.”
“It’s on the forbidden list,” Bar-Hillel says, primly.
“But we keep agents there,” she says.
“To observe. To report. Nothing more.”
“He got involved.”
“Sooner or later,” Professor Hashimi says, “we all have to get involved.”
